


be stuck fixating on one star

by clytemnestras



Category: Flowers (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-02
Updated: 2016-06-02
Packaged: 2018-07-11 17:22:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7062412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/pseuds/clytemnestras
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Donald gets the shell at the top, two paper wings bracketing it. It’s the smallest, like a chunk has been broken off.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	be stuck fixating on one star

The house is dreadfully, horribly silent. Donald has picked through every room, stomping louder and louder between rooms as he strikes off the list items, to inform the bricks of his displeasure. They groan a little, but mostly ignore him. It’s not very gratifying.

When he gets to Amy’s room there’s this little shell windchime hanging on her lightswitch that he’s never really noticed before. Just another stupid noise. The shells shift when he brushes against them, sweeping the room with their soft, dreamy cadence and he sees there’s writing there. Amy’s birdlike scrawl on the tiny, curved shells betraying the names of all the people she’s around day by day. Mum’s at the bottom. It jumps up from Mum, to Shun, to Dad.

Donald gets the shell at the top, two paper wings bracketing it. It’s the smallest, like a chunk has been broken off. Probably means something.

He shoves the nearest pile of clothes into his bag and tries to not look at the rest of the room. It’s both haphazard and un-lived in; bed not made but not slept in and it makes him feel slightly nauseous to see. He blinks the room away and turns to leave but slips on something. A shell, cut from the chime. It has _Abigail_ written on it. Donald stomps on it until it shatters.

The air feel close and smokey around him; sticking in his lungs and swelling, swelling until they feel huge and the rest of him feels tiny and he wonders if this is what it’s like to be Amy hidden away up here. If this is what it’s like to be above the world. Breathless.

He runs down the stairs and outside until coldness lines his lungs and the clouds of his breath feels like all the dust he’s been carrying trying to escape.

Donald stands on the edge of the land and looks out at the sludge. The whole field is brown muddy slime. It’s been raining for days.

The wetness is seeping through the bag of clothes in his shoulder but he can’t care. They’re not his clothes.

They rent out the fields every summer. Or, his mum does. His dad has ‘no feelings’ about ‘some weirdos with donkeys trampling the grass.’

A few years ago, some festival blew through here and there was an old biddy with a stall full of videotapes sitting just away from the other sellers and the remote-control plane he had been flying to test the new motor had fallen from the sky and crashed onto her table.

She didn’t look up from her tea.

When Donald got to her and the wreckage she had smiled up and offered him the whole table of VHS tapes for £5. Her name was Penelope and she kissed his cheek with her wrinkled old maw and it was the first time he’d felt that from someone who didn’t share his blood.

The videoplayer he planned on disassembling became his best friend for a summer. He spent hours looking between the window and the TV screen, comparing the slowness of his family wilting ( _ha_ ) and the speed at which things recuperate in technicolour. These were nothing like the old black and white films Grandma used to show him, where Mum and Amy would turn the volume off and would play music to score the scenes. These were glossy, and american. These were  _movies._ Full of dreams and prettiness and hope.

He thinks if this were a movie, a happy-bright tale of family dysfunction his dad would only be nudge-wink suicidal and his mother would be beautiful and long ago divorced for a happier man and his sister would be in furs and not really his sister (and secretly, unsecretly, desperately in love with him) and the world would be painted gentle in pinks and yellows.

Only, this is not a movie, and his dad has a tape recorder full of suicide notes and his mother fucked the builder and his sister is really his hospitalised lesbian sister and it's brown and grey, all of it is fucking brown and grey and _shit_.

The ache to ruin the house thrums through him. He wants to smash through the bricks through to the empty, silent dust, to go find that tape of _The Royal Tenenbaums_ and pull out the film, threading it through the cogs of the clockwork engine staining his carpet with oil. But he won’t.

The rain has soaked all the way through his coat now, and it plasters his hair down, slick and cold. His phone beeps in his pocket. _Amy wants jam._

Then, a moment later.

_Spacefreak. Jam please._

He shakes his head enough that raindrops scatter around him and he laughs into the sound of the storm. Jam. He can do jam.


End file.
